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The Bosniaks: Failing Role Models for Muslim Europeans Adisa Busuladžic´ University of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

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The Bosniaks: Failing Role Models for Muslim Europeans Adisa Busuladžic´ University of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina The Bosniaks: Failing Role Models for Muslim Europeans adisa busuladžic´ University of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina this paper explores the diverging political ori- entations and the revival of Islam in the post-socialist and post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, arguing that these new trends among the Bosniaks are resulting from their unclear viewpoints on security, cit- izenship and state. As a nation emerging from the political culture of a mixed eastern and communist heritage and the recent genocide, the Bosniaks are lacking trust both in institutions and in the essential mechanisms of European political heritage. This volatility is ampli- fied by the Bosnian institutional framework in which the local polit- ical and religious leaders – along with the international community’s representatives effectively ruling the country – keep on squandering the historic opportunity for redesigning the Bosniaks into a vibrant nation which could serve as a role model for the growing population of Muslim Europeans. The specific capacity and texture of Bosnian European culture in-between elaborated in this paper, indicates the need for multilateral cooperation in reshaping its outdated mecha- nisms with the emerging ones. While obtaining an appropriate niche on the European soil, the Bosniaks would also be able to contribute to a makeover of the traditional European contours into wider, all- inclusive and ecumenical European perspectives. The Bosniaks entered the contemporary European and the world’s stage, closing the 20th century as the victims of a genocide, better known as ‘ethnic cleansing’ during the 1992–1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Although journalists’ reports from the field clearly stated that there was a genocide going on (Gutman 1993; Vulliamy 1994;Rieff 1995), and even after they had won the most prestigious journalistic award for those dispatches, once the dispatches where bound in a book, the word genocide would be followed by a watered down apposition – ‘ethnic cleansing,’ albeit in inverted commas. Roy Gutman’s book: A witness volume 3 | number 2 Adisa Busuladžic´ to genocide: The 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning dispatches on the ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Bosnia is the most telling example of the occurrence. This post-modernist euphemism was finally dropped fourteen years later when, in January 2009, the European Parliament adopted [212] the Srebrenica Genocide Resolution and recognized July 11th, as the Day of commemoration of the Srebrenica genocide all over Europe. The Resolution refers to the infamous massacre of Bosniaks in July of 1995 as ‘a carnage’ in which ‘more than 8 000 Muslim men and boys, who had sought safety in this area under the protection of the United Nations Protection Force (unprofor), were summarily ex- ecuted by Bosnian Serb forces commanded by General Mladicandby´ paramilitary units, including Serbian irregular police units which had entered Bosnian territory from Serbia; whereas nearly 25 000 women, children and elderly people were forcibly deported, making this event the biggest war crime to take place in Europe since the end of the Second World War’ (European Parliament 2009). Nevertheless, the Resolution somehow avoids to mention that (a) those 8,000 Muslim men and boys, were the Bosniaks, and /b) that those victims were not ‘men and boys’ only. According to the data available at the official web-site of Srebrenica- Potocari Memorial Center (Memorijalni Centar Srebrenica-Potocari 2010), there were 57 women and girls among the massacre victims. Ac- tually, a careful look at the still incomplete list of 8,373 Srebrenica genocide victims shows that the oldest victim happened to be a 97- year old woman, while the youngest was a girl, age 8.Alas,therewas no mention of them in the European Parliament’s Resolution on any official un or eu document dealing with, what now everybody rec- ognizes as, ‘the biggest war crime to take place in Europe since the Second World War.’ The aforementioned General Mladic,´ indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (icty)forthe1992–1995 siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica massacre is still a fugitive from justice, since the attempts to hunt him down and arrest him have not hitherto produced any results. The only thing the police had managed to seize from Mladic´ were his diaries, whose content has been recently made public by the Tribunal. One of the most quoted lines from those ijems The Bosniaks: Failing Role Models for Muslim Europeans diaries refers to the fact that during the Bosnian war the then-Serbian and Croatian Presidents, Slobodan Milosevic´ and Franjo Tudjman, respectively, held several clandestine meetings ‘offering Bosnian Mus- lims to each other and none wanted them’ (Macedonian Information Agency 2010). [213] the history of unwanted nation For the past hundred years or so, the Bosniaks seem to be the main subjects of constant haggling and trade-offs of the ruling elites in Bosnia’s neighboring countries – Serbia and Croatia. As a result, there have been constant reductions and changing interpretations of their national identity and fate in both the European and the international context. The root cause of this phenomenon can be tracked down by following the historic roots of Bosniaks. The Bosniaks made up about 44 per cent of Bosnia and Herzegov- ina’s 4.5-million pre-war population. They embraced Islam some 600 years ago, when the Ottomans conquered the Balkans. Many of them converted to Islam from another Bosnian peculiarity – the Bosnian church, which constituted an indigenous separatist and schismatic sect, resulting from the import of Bulgarian and Manichean spiritual her- itage, as well as Bosnian refusal of Hungarian attempts to appoint a Hungarian bishop in this medieval kingdom. Consequently, Hungar- ian leaders convinced the Pope of religious heresy in Bosnia and the need for a crusade against the Bosnian church between 1235 and 1241 (Fine 1975, 328). This historic episode is very significant for the overall political and cultural profile of Bosnia, showing that even before the Ottomans, this country’s inhabitants had never been a part of the European main- stream. After the Austro-Hungarian Empire took over Bosnia from the Ot- tomans at the end of 19th century and, particularly, after Bosnia subse- quently became adjacent to the newly formed multiethnic Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later called Yugoslavia) in the aftermath of the First World War, Bosnian Muslims residing in towns started em- bracing secularism, while the rural ones continued to adhere to what would be later dubbed ‘being Muslim the Bosnian way’ (Bringa 1995). volume 3 | number 2 Adisa Busuladžic´ In Yugoslavia, where religion primarily served as a major ethnic identifier of the Slavic-speaking populations, the followers of Islamic faith were regarded by the largest ethnic groups (all of whom were Christians) as somewhat ominous reminders of 500 years of the Ot- [214] tomanruleintheBalkans. While the Bosnian Muslims remained uninterested in and un- clear of their own ethnic identity, the orthodox (Serbs) and catholic (Croats) Christians – with whom the Bosnian Muslim shared the same land and language – grew progressively nationalistic. In the midst of competing Serbian and Croatian nationalisms within Yugoslavia, Bosnian Muslims limited their religious practice to occasional visits to the mosque, observation of religious holidays or important rites of passage, e. g. birth, marriage, and death. Lacking the European cultural heritage, the Bosniaks had not un- derstood the importance of ethnic identity in gaining recognition as a group, due to the universalistic and highly antinationalistic stance of Islamic traditional theology. Therefore, they kept on identifying themselves as a religious group, seeing its own cultural and political identity as some sort of sacrilege against the universal Islamic nation – Ummah (the Islamic commu- nity). Such a stance was persistently spread by the local Ulema (Muslim clergy), as well as by the neighboring nationalist circles of Serbia and Croatia, who, in this way, were given a chance to assimilate the anti- nationalistic Bosniaks (thus considered ‘anationalist’) and include the Bosnian territory within their own national boundaries. This trend was meandering in different directions during 45 years of the communist era following the end of the Second World War. At first, the Bosniaks were not recognized at all as a separate ethnic and cultural group. For the first 25 years in power, the communist regime continued to exploit the universalistic stance of immature Bosniak na- tional elites. Ironically, at the peak of secularization and atheization of Bosnian Muslims in the early 1970s, the Yugoslav communist leadership de- cided to forestall the rise of competing Serbian and Croatian nation- alisms within the Yugoslav Communist Party leadership by recogniz- ing Bosnian Muslims as ‘Muslims,’ a separate ethnic, in fact, a quasi- ijems The Bosniaks: Failing Role Models for Muslim Europeans religious nation, bestowing upon them a name which denoted their di- minished, almost non-existent religious identity. Paradoxically, in this way the communist regime set the basis for an intense identification with the religious aspect of Bosniak identity which followed a couple of decades later. [215] The communists decided to ‘promote’ the Bosniaks under the odd ethnic name – the ‘Muslims,’ as opposed to the religious group of Muslims (the local language requires the word ‘Muslims’ as a religious group to be written with lower case
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